It’s census time in Japan! Filling out official forms in Japanese can be very difficult and annoying because of the vast amounts of kanji contained in them. My Japanese teacher asked me to bring it to fill it out during my lesson, unfortunately I spent most of the time telling her that I didn’t understand anything on it.

This post isn’t about me not understanding anything in Japan though, if it was we would be here all day. No, it is about that little cartoon baby in the top left hand corner of this post. His name is Census-kun and he is the official mascot of this 2010 census. Quite how a baby in a nappy with a pen represents a population tally is anyone’s guess but logic was something thrown out of the window a long time ago in Japan.

One word that you learn very quickly when you first come to Japan is the word “kawaii”, it means cute and if you listen to the conversations of just about any group of girls (from 5 years old until about 50) it seems like it is the only word in their lexicon. Just about anything can be “kawaii”, shop fronts, bags, anything by Disney, drains in the road or things that actually are cute.

Due to the fact that everyone loves all things “kawaii” in Japan (hell this is the country that paints Pokémon on the planes of it’s national airline),  just about everything that can possibly have a little mascot, does. Very few of them make much sense. Here are a few of my favourites.

Here is Pipo, he is the mascot for the police department. For some reason he is naked expect for a belt. In Japan the policemen DO NOT walk around naked with only a belt on.

This is Peko-chan, she is the mascot for Fujiya sweet company, she is always licking her lips because of all the yummy sweets. You see plastic status of her around a lot and I always used to think there was some kind of strawberry stuck to her face.

This is Colonel Sanders, you know him. Here however, he is dressed as a samurai and Evangelion Unit-01. I don’t know why.

Here is the bunny that is the mascot of NOVA English school, the school kind of has a bad reputation and the bunny is really ugly so I guess they go well with each other.

Finally, here is Prince Pickles, the mascot of the Japanese self defence force. He is probably the only one of these mascots to have been on active service for his country.

As a result of coming into contact with all these cute innocent mascots, I going to develop Mascot-kun. He could be the mascot to represent all these little Japanese mascots. He could take them under his wing when they are young and inexperienced, form a union to protect their rights and then when they get old and forgotten, can run a nursing home for them. Unfortunately I have no picture available of him, he prefers to shun the limelight.

I’ve been a bit of an anime fan for a long time. However, recently I have become a bit stuck in my ways, I don’t really watch too many new shows and those that I do usually have something in common with the old shows that I love. Either they are some kind of sequel or made by the same production company or something.

Of these new shows some have delighted me (Evangelion films), some have disappointed me (Macross Frontier) and others have confused me (Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt).

Nothing that has been made in the last 10 years has entertained me quite as much as the old TV shows and films I watched in my teens. Something that many of those shows had in common was the music, brilliantly written by Yoko Kanno.

Back in the day I used to enjoy listening to soundtracks while doing school or university work. I found that listening to them let me think more than regular songs. I guess it was the lack of lyrics that helped. Now that I have no essays to write, pretty much the only soundtracks that remain on my MP3 player are those by Yoko Kanno.

As I grow older I am always seeking out new musical experiences in a hope of finding something that can touch my very soul in the same way Ringo Shiina’s music did when I first heard it. That day has not yet come but sometimes when I hear a bit of music for the first time I get an odd feeling of déjà vu and think that I have heard the song before. I dig around my brain and realise the similarity is often with a Yoko Kanno song. This is happening with extraordinary regularity and although I’m only listening to them for the first time most of these pieces were written way before Kanno thought her stuff up.

The time when I really reached braking point with her music though was when I first listened to Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized, an album described by the BBC as a towering artistic statement. I thought it was indeed a great album but I felt that nagging feeling while listening to it that I had heard music like this before. Straight after listening, I played the 1st Ghost in the Shell soundtrack and lo and behold half the songs on there were pretty much directly lifted from that Spiritualized album. I was kind of disgusted, especially as Kanno was an artist I held in such high regard and I just found that my favourite song of hers was basically a rip off of another work.

So for quite some time I basically stopped listening to her music. Shunning her whenever her music came up when randomly playing my entire music library but I did not remove it. You see, I think it is just too good. Whether she lifts some of her music wholesale from others or not, almost every piece of music she creates sounds wonderful and is a joy to listen to.

I am obviously aware that music is not created in a vacuum, people will always be inspired by others with what they write. However taking music written by others and claiming it is your own is a very bad thing indeed. I am unable to check if Kanno credits the people whose work she uses because the CD’s of hers I own all are in England and the credits in them are probably in Japanese anyway. When I googled to see if others had noticed the same things I had, I saw that with some of the songs people have accused her of plagiarism for, she had actually worked with the original writer when creating her music.

Another way to look at it is to think of Cowboy Bebop. Cowboy Bebop was a wonderful TV show which she worked on and that show’s entire ethos was Jazz. While I don’t know much about Jazz, I hear that people often “quote” other songs and work them into their own sounds. Cowboy Bebop was a show that did this from its very core. The show worked by taking inspiration from other films, TV shows and pop culture and working it into it’s own story, taking other great ideas and changing them, putting a unique spin on them. The show’s music was no exception, just the other day a friend linked a Jazz song (Sing, Sing, Sing by Benny Goodman) on twitter and I gave it a listen. I found that the opening bars were just like Cowboy Bebop’s song, Black Coffee. However after the opening the songs do go in separate directions.

So maybe Yoko Kanno’s way of creating music is the Cowboy Bebop way, the Jazz way. Taking “licks” from other works and doing new things with them and creating great things. Maybe she finds happiness when someone notices her inspirations hidden in the songs she writes. This I think is a very cool way to make music, however I also think that she should be careful sometimes, the things she did with Synchronized’s music is not so much a homage but dangerously close to copying.

If you want to hear some of these similarities in her music for yourself you can check out a few videos people have made on Youtube.

One of the moments that disappointed me most during my short stay in Japan occurred when I went to watch the Michael Jackson documentary, This is it. At the end of the movie the entire audience spontaneously started applauding. This is coming from a country of people who according to Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright are very reserved when showing their emotions during a film.

I was incredibly shocked that they chose to clap after this film. Don’t get me wrong, I am not belittling MJ’s achievements as a musician, I love his work. Nor am I devaluing what he was attempting to do with those final concerts that never took place.

I simply thought the film was terrible.

The whole film stunk of DVD extra footage, the kind of material which would only have appeared hidden as a menu option on a DVD of the event itself if fate had not taken the course it did. It also just seemed like a puff piece, where everyone interviewed on it was falling over themselves to say what a great person MJ was and didn’t give me any insight into the creative process. There was one overlong and drawn out sequence where MJ has a brief disagreement with someone over a bit of choreography but that is about all the conflict and tension we were allowed to see.

I feel that This Is It failed in 2 key areas, as a documentary it failed because I felt I did not learn anything new from it. As a film it failed simply because it was it just wasn’t very interesting, I cannot understand anyone who would want to watch it more than once.

The reason I am writing about this now and not a year or so ago is because I recently saw another documentary at the cinema, this one was called Ayrton Senna: Beyond the Speed of Sound.

I tell you what, this was one of the best films I have ever seen. Everything about it was a triumph. The way his story was presented on screen was nothing sort of exceptional. I felt just about every emotion it is possible for a human watching a film to experience. Well, maybe that is going a bit far but I did leave the cinema in awe of Senna, Alan Prost and also the guy who directed the film, Asif Kapadia.

I loved the way Senna’s rivalry with Prost was shown. They could easily had cast Prost as some bad guy but it leaves you with a wonderful impression of his driving style and personality and how it was different from Senna’s.

Being an F1 fan, I know about many of the famous events in his career, but many of the things he did that were shown here were new to me. Really Aytron Senna’s exploits were before my time, I don’t really remember anything in F1 from before 1992 but the footage here, whether it was new to me or not, was presented in such an exciting way. During some scenes I was genuinely on edge and tense despite the events having taken place almost 25 years ago.

Towards the end of the film when it began to show events leading up to his inevitable demise, I started to feel quite emotional with a tear in my eye. I was not the only one, behind me a lady, probably dragged along by her husband, was crying her eyes out. As I got up to leave after the credits had rolled I looked down at her and saw the vast amount of tissues she had used in a pile on the chair next to her.

Earlier I said that I am an F1 fan, maybe some of you are thinking that I am rating the film too highly as a result, but I disagree. This is a great FILM I recommend it for anyone if they want to see how a great documentary film should be made. This is simply a great piece of cinema. I have many friends who dislike F1 and simply don’t understand it. I remember I once had a conversation were they compared it to tennis. If they watch this film it might not change their minds but it would show them some of the great stories F1 has to offer.

Shockingly this British made film is not being released in the UK until July 2011, it has already had a theatrical release over here. I want the DVD of this so badly because the Portuguese interviews were only subtitled in Japanese so I felt I missed a bit. The fact there is still a bit more of this wonderful film still to expirience makes me a very happy boy indeed.

Due to the fact that I now have loads of devices that can record video, I decided to do a vlog about my time in China. This may be the only video I ever subject you to so don’t worry too much.

The shop in that video was apparently established in the eighth year of the reign of the emperor Xianfeng in the Qing Dynasty. If only they could see what was being sold there now.

I remember a long, long time ago, back in primary school, everyday I would eat a packed lunch. Wrapped inside a plastic box with the latest, greatest cartoon characters embossed on it were tasty selections such as sandwiches, crisps, an apple, some kind of drink and if I was really lucky, a chocolate bar. Now, I work in a primary school and have to eat lunch with the kids. Usually cooked lunches are served every day but since the end of the summer holidays the kitchen is in the process of being renovated. This means I have to bring in a packed lunch to school everyday to eat with the kids.

In Japan packed lunches are called bento. In general they are available in everything from disposable plastic containers to hand crafted lacquerware. For the school kids though, they too have reusable plastic boxes with cartoon characters on, however they are kind of different to their European counterparts. For a start they generally have 2 removable compartments, one for rice and one for other stuff. Also they have a pair of reusable chopsticks attached to them. In the ‘other stuff’ compartment there is generally a selection stuff like sausages, chicken, vegetables, omelette, fruit, seaweed or more rice.

The first time I came in to work after the summer holiday, I walked in with rather a shitty plastic bag full on food I picked up from the conbini that morning. The bag contained a pasta salad, an onigiri, some Jagariko (crisps basically) and some delicious Calpis. Come lunch time, I was not prepared from the reactions this got me:

“Oh, that’s not fair”, came the cries.
“I want some!”
“Can I have your Calpis? I’ll swap you my wheat tea!”

And that was just the teachers.

In all seriousness, the teachers told me that what I had was not lunch but just a load of snacks. The surprised looks of the kids around me showed me that having crisps for lunch was a very unusual thing for a meal. It seems that in Japan what constitutes a packed lunch is very fixed. Housewives will spend ages slaving away at the bento for their kids or husbands, trying to make them interesting. I guess that because you always more or less know what is going to be in there, so having a nice picture makes a difference.

I’ve seen kids with little characters in their bento made from cabbage, other vegetables made to look like flowers and even the word “LOVE” written in seaweed. Check these ones out too.

The main thing I’ve got from this is that while kids always get the same thing in their lunch boxes everyday they really just want something yummy. I wonder if I have inspired anyone to be a rebel and do the unthinkable and ask for something different from everyone else, something which they would rather eat.

I doubt it.

No one likes to be the odd one out and the simple act of bringing crisps as part of my lunch made me feel more of an outsider than anything else that has previously happened to me in Japan. Still, the upshot of all the strange looks, disbelieving expressions and giggling (that actually was from the teachers) has taught me many new expressions in Japanese.

One day, I think I’m going to bring a Kitkat into work, hide it and then put it on the table just as everyone is finishing their meals and observe the kids reactions. My only worry is who is going to clean up the mess after 30 kids heads simultaneously explode.